It all sounds very much expected, and very much the same. Which wouldn’t be so bad if that didn’t mean putting himself in the same crowd as so many corporatized, for-sale-at-the-mall acts.

Their potential is the wrong thing to appreciate: it's their immediacy, their unstudied and unfocused energy, that hits the spot.

Transference is the victim of an unfortunate irony--the more honed, the less it cuts.

Front-to-back, Real Life Is No Cool does exactly what it set out to do and no more: be a collection of dance pop tunes so solid it feels like they’ve always been there.

Ultimately, as the disc draws to a close and one hushed sonic wisp after another drifts by, justice is done to neither Foster’s considerable talents nor Dickinson’s genius.

He and his accompanists perform perfectly, with Barker’s elegant leads being one of, rather than the exclusive, focal point.

This is a great album, and you’re probably going to want to hear it again and again.

Even accounting for his career of uncharitable experimentation, Martin Rev’s eighth solo album is something new again. To wit, it’s a haunting, intricate electro-classical record.

Fall Be Kind really mines the depths of the b-bin: musical theater + jam band + Putumayo. Liking it feels goofy, even though it’s pretty good.

Limitations can be freeing, but King Midas seems to tip-toe around a great deal of Martin’s artistic inspiration. The album successfully shows off an under-heralded side of his work, but it’s a shame that the sonic violence was deliberately repressed, rather than skillfully incorporated.

Dizzying and beautiful at once, it is unlike anything else from 2009.

Its appeal is immediate, rather than slow burning, and you can see it gaining fans who are less transfixed by eccentricity, more interested in tightly constructed songs. Yet at the same time, the words and images in these songs are deeply personal and self-revealing in a way that, I think, the first two albums were not.

It’s rich; despite the fact that the cuts are short and sweet, each represents any number of possibilities for repurposing and restyling.

Far from terrible, Echo Party sounds merely confused.

Though Kid Sister might lack some versatility, her club-friendly material is more than above average, and gleams colorfully if synthetically, like her outstretched hand of freshly painted nails.

Real Estate’s sound is imbued with the same sentimentality as the rest of the indie class of 2009, but with zero ambition.

The thing holds together remarkably well, thanks to Wale’s upstart charisma and remarkable versatility.

'Love In Outer Space,' is as seductive, giddy, and beautiful as ever. It’s a testament to the album’s overall strength that it comes near the tail end of the record. It’s about as perfect a mixture of dubstep and techno as anything out there.

Landing may take a number of listens to begin to sink in, but when it does, it stays with you.

The third of the record that’s truly Molina & Johnson shines the brightest, when their discreet identities fall away to create Burroughs’ and Gysin’s third mind.

Cold Cave are neither here nor there. The pop hooks aren’t catchy enough, the ‘coldness’ too rote, the flirtation with eroticism simply an abbreviated spin on Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.”

To think about Invisible Girl too much would most certainly do it a disservice. Khan and BBQ are obviously not reinventing the wheel -- they’re just reveling in the eternal command of lock-up-your-daughters rock & roll.

Unexpected Guests, his collection of B-sides and easy-to-miss cameos, is unsatisfying because it doesn’t offer the space that Doom needs to build his narratives.

Brilliant Colors understand to stick to what you know, and keep it short and sweet--a couple of platitudes that serve this band well.

For now, Extended Vacation is nice enough, at times seductively lovely, but it lands short of essential.

With Carl Craig producing, Jaumet offers a fittingly stripped-down suite of tense, stomach-churning tracks. Dappled with oily synth slicks, frittered timbres and blacklight radiance, it can be a heavy listen.

It is awfully difficult to bring audiences out of themselves without stacks of speakers, massed bodies and the possibility of timing things just right, all of which only the right context can provide.

Aside from the average genre stabs, What Will We Be is a surprisingly sullen and ponderous album. Absent is Banhart’s mania, the zaniness that he always seemed barely able to contain.